Christian Church. The climax of incongruity was attained when the rustic title was attributed to the rectors of the large old parishes in the metropolitan boroughs. Still, the stress laid upon the decanal division was in itself harmless; and perhaps the absolute absence of sanctity or authority in the office made it an easier channel through which to work a voluntary organization, than if those clergymen had been recognised and full- blown prelates.
It was to the credit of the Church Institution and of the Church Defence Societies, πολλῶν ὀνομάτων μόρφη μία, that between four and five years since they felt that fragmentary meetings and a weak central body in London, itself working with half-manacled hands even as to questions of Church politics, was not sufficient to maintain the truce or strengthen the alliance between the Churchmen who had taken up the new Church movement. 'Church Congress' was the next rallying cry, originally raised in the Defence Association at Cambridge, in which University the first gathering of the kind was held in King's College Hall, in December, 1861.
The notion of a Congress was a direct offshoot, as far as England is concerned, from the British Association, which seems to have been the first to teach the lesson that men might meet in peripatetic session, by the easy elective process of buying a ticket, to lecture, to talk, and to mould each other's notions, without the final conclusion of a formal vote. Archæology soon followed suit, and later the airy nothing called 'Social Science.' The Evangelical Alliance, too, was in the nature of a congress. 'Congresses'—antiquarian, humanitarian, &c.—have also for the last twenty years or thereabouts been in fashion on the Continent; and so we should be inclined to attribute the fact of Church Congresses having made a simultaneous appearance in the Churches of England and Rome to an involuntary cyclic coincidence. Two Congresses at Mechlin, one of them distinguished by M. de Montalembert's brilliant plea for political liberty as the best safeguard of Catholicism, and the other carefully guarded from any such explosive element, but in compensation garnished by an exceedingly rich exhibition of mediæval Church art; and one at Munich, headed by the enlightened Döllinger, and snubbed accordingly from Rome, sum up the Roman Catholic list, with, we believe, some minor gatherings at Cologne and elsewhere in Germany. In England the Church Congresses have been four. The small one at Cambridge heralded a more imposing gathering at Oxford. Church Congresses at both these places were treading on velvet. Those who wished well to the movement felt that its real crisis had come when the off-hand acceptance of a spontaneous invitation to
